OK, I'll grant you the smart card example. I have no experience with those guy; there are what, a half-dozen vendors? For obvious reasons they don't talk about

OK, I'll grant you the smart card example. I have no experience with those guy; there are what, a half-dozen vendors? For obvious reasons they don't talk about the details of their software much. The nub of our disagreement: the definition of an embedded system. Per Wikipedia, "An embedded system is a computer system designed to perform one or a few dedicated functions often with real-time computing constraints." So a cheap MP3 player counts as an embedded system, because playing audio is what its hardware and software is designed for. A personal computer, in whatever physical form, that runs a variety of applications, including audio players, is not an embedded system. And therefore, no, I don't count smart phone applications as embedded systems software. If you're writing device drivers that are burned into a smart phone's ROM, on the other hand, then I'd consider it embedded software. When you find hardware running Android that's designed to be dedicated to a single task, such as, say, a climate control system, then you can count it as an embedded system. A tablet PC or an application running on it that sends commands to your existing climate control system, not so much.